Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations: Watching the Clock

by Christopher L. Bennet

  She took a shuddering breath. “I’m not even sure anymore why I did it. Or if I’d have done the same thing if I’d thought about it more. I just don’t know.”

  “Then let’s figure it out together,” Dulmur said.

  After a few more moments’ silence, Garcia began to speak. “It went like I told you before, at first. The vortex, seeing Regulus in ruins. The captain called Doctor Takizawa and a few others to the bridge after a while. I was one of them.”

  “Why did he ask for you?”

  “Takizawa suggested it. Said he wasn’t sure if we were forward or back in time, so an archaeology grad student might be helpful.” She smirked. “He said. Fact was, he’d been coming on to me the whole trip. Hoped I’d be impressed watching him handle a crisis.” She rolled her eyes. “Once we saw . . . what had happened . . . it wasn’t long before the word got out to everyone. People started to ask if we could go back and change things. Takizawa took another look at the vortex and figured out there was a chance. But first we’d need to find out what happened and when so we could warn people.”

  “So you tracked down the edge of the light sphere so you could document the attack.”

  She nodded. “Then the captain . . . he gave us a vote about whether to risk another trip through. Almost everyone voted yes.”

  “Except you.”

  “The lone voice of dissent.”

  “Why did you argue against going back in time?”

  Garcia shook her head. “It just didn’t seem right. How did we know it would work? I mean, even aside from the danger of getting crushed in the vortex, just the idea of changing history—I mean, it’s silly, isn’t it? Change is something that takes time to happen. If something changes, that means there’s a version before the change and a version after the change. How can a single moment in time come before or after itself? That’s a contradiction in terms.”

  Dulmur was impressed. Garcia had hit on a key intuition about the nature of time that most laypeople overlooked. Of course, there were other key principles she was missing, hard evidence and quantum theory showing that a timeline could exist in multiple alternate states without paradox. But it wasn’t as simple as erasing events that had already happened, despite how it might appear to amateurs. For a layperson with no training in temporal theory, Garcia showed surprising insight.

  “So what did you think would happen if you survived going back?” he asked.

  “Maybe we wouldn’t survive. Maybe the laws of the universe wouldn’t let us. I mean, yeah, there was that time-loop thing about a year . . .” She winced. “Sixteen years ago, but that was just a few seconds doubling back on themselves, like a fold in spacetime.” Dulmur nodded. The Manheim Event was one temporal incident he would never forget. “It’s not like one ship going back would make the whole universe fold back over and replay itself. If we did change things, we’d just create a parallel timeline, like in the adventure holos. A new history that’s alongside the old. I mean, that follows, right? The only way there could be two versions of the same moment in time is if they happen at the same time. Side by side.”

  “Those are good arguments,” Dulmur said without confirming or denying them. “But I take it you didn’t convince anybody.”

  “Takizawa said it was possible, spun some theories.”

  “What theories?”

  “I don’t know. As far as I could tell, he was making it all up.” She shrugged. “But it convinced the others.”

  “But not you.”

  Garcia shook her head. “They looked at me like I was a monster for not wanting to fix it.”

  “So why didn’t you go along with them?”

  “I just . . . Even if it could be done, I wasn’t sure we should. It was a decision that should be made by someone more important than us.”

  “Did you tell them that?”

  She nodded. “But Takizawa said the vortex was starting to close, that we wouldn’t have time to call for help. And Dor said there might not be anybody left alive anywhere. It had to be us, and it had to be then.

  “So they decided a vote of thirty-seven to one was good enough, and they set course for the vortex.”

  “But you weren’t willing to accept that.”

  She shook her head again. “I knew it was a terrible mistake. If we could actually change history, how could we know we were making it better? What if . . . what if our warning made the Federation so afraid that it became a police state? What if taking preemptive action against an enemy nobody knew about yet spooked the Cardassians or the Romulans into starting another war? That might leave the Federation weaker when the invasion did come and make things even worse.”

  Again, Dulmur was impressed by Garcia’s temporal intuition. “Did you suggest any of these things at the time?”

  “No, I didn’t have time to think it through yet. And they wouldn’t have listened anyway. They didn’t want to face this reality.”

  “But you could?”

  “I didn’t think we had a choice. So I . . . slipped out and went to the engine compartment. Like I said, I’ve read some stuff about ancient warp technology. I knew enough to know what systems I had to damage, though the best I could do was change settings at random and hope for the—well, the worst.”

  “But the others tried to stop you.”

  “They didn’t know I was there at first.” She shrugged. “Archaeologist, remember? I’m good at crawling through tight spaces, like maintenance crawlways.” Her slight grin faded. “But once the engines started malfunctioning, they tracked me down pretty fast. And . . . well, you know what happened next.”

  “You need to say it on the record, Ms. Garcia.”

  She closed her eyes. “They pulled me away, screamed at me. I fought back, tried to keep doing damage. They piled on me, beat me.” She shuddered. “It’s all a blur after that. Except for Takizawa’s face . . . he was right there at the front. He got his heavy mitts all over me after all, just not the way he wanted.”

  Garcia blinked away tears. “And then I woke up in your sickbay. And I saw the others . . . looking at me. And I knew . . . we were stuck in this future, with no chance of going back to save all those lives. I’d gotten my way,” she said with sardonic pride, which then dissolved into a shuddering gasp. “I’ve never felt so ashamed.”

  11:37 UTC

  “That . . . woman!” Wataru Takizawa cried. “I knew she wouldn’t stay quiet!”

  “In fact, she tried to protect you,” Lucsly told him.

  Dulmur, seated next to Lucsly at the table in briefing room one, added, “In spite of what you did to her.”

  “What about what she did? Damned sixty billion lives to annihilation!”

  “Or saved trillions more in the long run,” Lucsly said. “You don’t know the whole story, Doctor. The Borg were the worst threat this galaxy’s ever faced, and thanks to a whole sequence of events culminating twenty-four days ago, that threat has now been permanently ended. Go back to undo that sequence of events and you would restore a virtually unstoppable menace.

  “Time doesn’t let you pick and choose. Make a change for the better in one place and it can spawn a greater change for the worse somewhere else. It’s entropy, Doctor. You must understand entropy. You travel into the past, it’s an injection of higher entropy from the future just to start with. You do work to modify the course of events and you add even more entropy, more disorder.” Lucsly shook his head. “The more we tamper with time, the more chaos we create. The best we can do is take the history we have and deal with it.”

  Dulmur smiled to himself. Normally, Lucsly was a man of few words, but get him going on temporal ethics and he became a revivalist preacher. Well, if revivalist preachers spoke in a no-nonsense deadpan. Still, at a time like this, Dulmur found his partner’s passion for the cause—his sheer certainty that they were doing the right thing, no matter how painful—to be inspiring.

  Takizawa wasn’t impressed, though. “Just words, from a gray-suited bureaucrat looking for excuses
to limit his imagination. Any work increases entropy. By your logic, we shouldn’t ever try to build anything at all!”

  “It depends on what you’re tearing down in the process,” Dulmur told him.

  “We were trying to save billions of lives!”

  “Oh, sure, and you showed your altruism by trying to beat a fifty-six-kilo girl to death after it was too late to make a difference!”

  Takizawa faltered. “So we got carried away. We were angry. Anyone would be. It’s regrettable, but it was the heat of the moment.”

  “And it was against the law,” Lucsly said. “So is attempted temporal alteration.”

  “The law. Like that matters at a time like this!”

  Lucsly rose, and Dulmur followed suit. “Law is all that keeps us civilized at a time like this,” Lucsly said. “And without the laws of time, none of the other laws mean anything at all.”

  18:02 UTC

  Dulmur found Teresa Garcia in Everett’s observation lounge, looking out at the warp trails as the ship headed back to Earth with the Verity in tow. “You doing all right?”

  She glared at him, but then she softened. “I was going to say that’s a stupid question under the circumstances. But I guess after what all of you have been through . . . God, these past fifteen years . . . maybe ‘all right’ has to be a relative thing.”

  “It hasn’t been that bad. Okay, we’ve had a lot of rough patches these past seven years in particular. But the Federation’s a really big place. It can absorb a lot. Even after something as huge as this, or the Genesis Wave, or the Dominion War—you’ll find out about those,” he added at her puzzled look, “—there are still hundreds of worlds that are safe, secure, prosperous, and generous enough to help out the people who need it. So even when something really bad happens, it doesn’t take too long to get us back on our feet again.” He shook his head. “Maybe after all this, we won’t bounce back quite as high for a while. But we still have plenty of what makes the Federation great—good people with good intentions and the means to do something about them.”

  Garcia smiled. “Nice sentiment. But how do you know there isn’t some even worse disaster lurking around the corner?”

  “Because I know a thing or two about the future,” Dulmur said. “Nothing specific, naturally. There are laws about that too. But I know . . . and don’t tell Lucsly I’m telling you this or he’ll put me on report . . .” Garcia nodded. “I know that the Federation is still around in the future. In a lot of possible futures. And if there were something worse than the past couple of months heading our way, there’d be no future for us—at all. So I think we’ve weathered the worst of it now.”

  She looked out the window again. “At least you’ve had time to get used to it. It’s still a shock for me.” She shook her head. “I still can’t blame any of them for what they did. Or for hating me for what I did.”

  After a moment, Dulmur patted her on the shoulder, very carefully. “You did the right thing, Ms. Garcia. More than that: you did the hard thing, because you knew it was right.” He gazed at her until she turned to look at him. “I’d still like to know, though . . . you never really told me why you did it.”

  She looked within herself for a long moment. “I guess . . . it just seemed so childish.”

  “Childish?”

  “To want to go back and make a bad thing not have happened anymore. That’s not the way life works. Tragedy happens, and people just have to accept it and move on. Learn from it. Grow stronger from it. I . . .” She looked away. “I lost my dad when I was six.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah. And I didn’t get the chance to go back and ‘fix’ it. I had to live with it, deal with it. It hurt like hell, it tore me up for years . . . but it’s part of who I am.” She sighed. “We’re the sum of our history. And there’s always going to be pain in that history. I mean, God, look at what I do. I study cultures that have died. It’s all about learning from tragedy.

  “So I guess I just knew that . . . even with a tragedy like this . . . it happened, and you have to learn from it and keep going. If you can just cheat, if you can go back and make it unhappen, then you’re stripping away the meaning. And that’s not living. That’s hiding from life.

  “Oh, I don’t even know if that makes sense.”

  Dulmur smiled. “I’ve rarely heard it said better.”

  Garcia smiled back, and he could see why Takizawa had flirted so hard with her. She was less than half his age, though, and he had other aims in mind for her. “So where do you go from here?”

  “I’ve been trying to figure that out. There’s no more Regulus III Science Academy, so my graduate career’s shot. Not to mention that I’ve been legally dead for nearly two-thirds as long as I’ve been alive. Damn, I’m almost forty.”

  “I’m sure your mom would be glad to see you’re alive.”

  “Yeah, there’s that. I’ve already sent her a message. I was afraid she might’ve been one of the casualties, but she lives on Vega, and they’ve come through all the wars and things just fine.”

  “That’s good.”

  “But . . . well, my mom is a strong-willed sort. Visiting is fine, but I couldn’t just go home and live there. I’d feel too stifled. And . . . there’d be so much catching up to do. I’d always be out of synch.”

  “The DTI has specialists for this,” Dulmur said, “people who can help you through the adjustment. You’re not the first people to be displaced in time one way or another.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  He hesitated. “But I think the Department might be able to offer you something more.”

  Garcia furrowed her brow. “What do you mean?”

  “You have a good instinct for time, Ms. Garcia. An intuition for how it works. More, you have a good instinct for protecting the timeline, and you’ve proven you’re willing to do it at great personal risk. Even if it means being unpopular with people who don’t understand why you’re doing the right thing. Those are the qualities that can make for a fine DTI agent.”

  After a moment, her eyes widened and she laughed. “You—you’re offering me a job?”

  “I’m offering you a chance,” he corrected. “DTI work isn’t easy. There’s an intensive three-month training program, and a lot of candidates wash out. And even if you make it . . .” He thought of George Faunt. “It wears on you in ways I can’t explain. It’s a thankless job, an unsung job. Most of it is classified, so you won’t even be able to talk to your family or friends about it—if you can even hold on to them. People won’t understand the strains you face, the responsibilities you hold. They’ll look at you as a joke, a hidebound drudge, or a jackbooted thug. The job will dominate your life, make you question reality, cut you off from normal people and their normal concerns. And it can literally drive you crazy. I’m not doing you any favors by offering you this. The smart thing for you to do would be to say ‘No, thank you’ and go back to your studies.” He gave her a sheepish look. “But we’ve had our losses too. We could use the help. At the very least, a student of galactic archaeology could be valuable as a researcher. But I think you have what it takes to be a field agent, Ms. Garcia. And that’s not something that can be said about a lot of people.”

  “Wow,” she said. “Really . . . wow.” She was silent for fourteen seconds. “Okay. I’ll do it.”

  Dulmur’s eyes widened. “You, uh, you don’t have to decide right away.”

  “You kidding? That’s the best offer I’ve gotten all decade.” Dulmur winced. “Oh. Sorry,” Garcia went on. “I guess you’ve heard every time joke there is, haven’t you?”

  “Be prepared to get very sick of them very fast.”

  “Okay, seriously, then . . . it’s a chance to do some good. What you do, it can’t always be about making sure disasters happen, can it? It’s about protecting people, preserving the good things as well as the bad?”

  “We sure like to think so.”

  “Then maybe it’ll give me an opportunity to ba
lance the scales, do something positive. At least . . . if I learn about how time works, and why it has to be preserved, maybe I’ll finally be able to know why what I did was right. So even if I wash out, at least it’ll give me some perspective.

  “As for the rest . . . I’ve never been one to go along with the crowd. If people can’t accept me for who I am and what I believe, I don’t need them anyway.”

  Dulmur had heard enough. He rose and extended his hand, and she responded in kind. “I’ll be happy to sponsor your admission to the DTI Academy,” he told her. “I have a feeling you’ll make it.”

  “A premonition?” she asked.

  “Oh, God, don’t even go there.”

  “Sorry.”

  18:27 UTC

  Lucsly wore a sour look as Dulmur composed his letter of recommendation for Garcia in Everett’s passenger lounge. “You think I’m making a mistake?” Dulmur asked.

  “She lied about the attempted alteration,” his partner replied.

  “Out of altruistic motives.”

  “Those can be the most dangerous ones.”

  “She came through in the end.”

  “Only after we confronted her with the facts.”

  “She was scared. She’d been beaten half to death.”

  “So was it altruism or fear?”

  “It can be both. People are complicated.”

  “Hm,” Lucsly said. “That’s the problem with them.”

  Dulmur chuckled. He knew Lucsly wouldn’t be happy until he was back home, tinkering with his antique clocks, surrounded by their linearity and precision. But that was just Lucsly.

  “You didn’t think I’d be a good agent at first,” Dulmur said.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Not that I noticed.”

  “I wasn’t going to make it easy for you.”

  “No, you wouldn’t have.”

  Lucsly examined him. “Is that why you’re recommending her? Because she reminds you of you?”

  “I guess I see a kindred spirit,” Dulmur conceded. Thinking of Garcia’s era of origin had reminded him of his own beginnings at the DTI, just a year and two months before the Verity’s displacement. His plight hadn’t been on the same level as hers, but he too had felt cast adrift, torn from his intended path by a quirk of quantum physics . . . and strongly motivated to do something about it.